The subject matter of this application is generally related to advertising.
Online video is a growing medium. The popularity of online video services reflect this growth. Advertisers see online video as another way to reach their customers. A form of advertising which is of interest to advertisers is video ads that are played as part of the video stream, sometimes called “in-stream” video advertisements.
Today, most in-stream video ads are sold as flights against a certain number of available impressions (sometimes referred to as “avails”). The conventional advertisement viewing experience for video is largely pre-programmed without providing advertisers with any assurances that the users who view their videos are part of the audience targeted for the advertisement. Moreover, the conventional advertisement viewing experience fails to provide users with the ability to determine the kinds of advertising that they prefer to watch. In-stream video advertisements should be useful for users and not simply a way for advertisers to target users for advertisements.